Tag: Foreclosure

In June, investors led by the world’s largest asset manager and the world’s largest bond-fund manager sued some of the world’s largest banks for breach of fiduciary duty as trustees of their investment funds. The investors are seeking damages for the equivalent of 1 million homeowners with $250,000 in damages suing at one time.

It’s too bad Keynes isn’t around today to see how the toxic combo of financial engineering, central bank liquidity and fraud have transformed the world’s biggest economy into a hobbled, crisis-prone invalid that’s unable to grow without giant doses of zero-rate heroin and mega-leverage crack cocaine.

Low-income D.C. residents—many of them retirees—have been losing their homes under a program in which tax rights are sold to private investors who add mind-boggling fees and then foreclose when they aren’t paid. And it’s all legal.

It’s May 2012 and we’re in Woodlawn, a largely African American neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. The goal of the HIT Squad, short for Housing Identification and Target, is to map blighted, bank-owned homes with overdue property taxes and neighbors angry enough about the destruction of their neighborhood to consider supporting a plan to repossess on the repossessors.

Bank of America employees regularly lied to homeowners seeking loan modifications, denied their applications for made-up reasons, and were rewarded for sending homeowners to foreclosure, according to sworn statements by former bank employees.

Did you know you could make your mortgage payments early and still be foreclosed on? That’s exactly what happened to a Florida man who says he not only made his loan payments ahead of time, but even paid more than was required each month, and is still being foreclosed on by Wells Fargo.

Legislation passed Friday in Florida “prevents a homeowner who loses a foreclosure case from recovering the property, even if the bank’s actions are later determined to be fraudulent,” the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reports.

A typo by banking giant Wells Fargo resulted in a more than two-year legal battle that came to a tragic conclusion in December when Larry Delassus’ heart stopped in a Los Angeles area courtroom, a new LA Weekly report reveals.

Foreclosures in New York City rose 19 percent last year as filings fell nationally by 3 points, a new report says. Meanwhile, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced a meager $1.9 million settlement with a robosigning giant, reports Catherine Curan at the New York Post.

Companies hired to spot wrongful foreclosures made more than $1 billion in a review process that was ultimately scuttled. Meanwhile, banks prepare to divide a $3.3 billion settlement between nearly 4 million borrowers without identifying who needs the money most.

The Independent Foreclosure Review was supposed to be a full and fair investigation of the big banks’ foreclosure abuses. But Monday morning, the very regulators who launched the program 18 months ago announced that it had all been a massive mistake and shut it down.

Homeowner advocates and some lawmakers are upset that an $8.5 billion settlement with JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and other banks over improper foreclosures would let lenders off the hook both financially and legally.

Credit card companies are increasingly turning to the legal system in their rush to collect money that is owed to them. But, there now exists a very big problem in this litigious-happy practice—nearly all these lawsuits may be flawed.

Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi joins “Democracy Now!” to discuss the dual history of Bank of America and the deregulation of banking ownership in the United States and to expose the holes in the $26 billion settlement deal that President Obama said would provide relief for American homeowners.

On Thursday, state and federal government representatives announced that five major banks—Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Ally Financial, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase—had agreed to pay their part in a settlement of more than $25 billion stemming from the mortgage market meltdown that caused millions of Americans to lose their homes.

Fannie and Freddie are required to help homeowners while earning profits so they can pay back the taxpayers who bailed them out. Here is our guide to the little-known federal regulator, Edward DeMarco, ultimately in charge of the two companies. You may have never heard of him, but as The Washington Post put it, he’s “the most powerful man in housing policy.”

A sunken housing market has turned foreclosure auctions into feeding grounds for the vultures of American capitalism. Low prices mean plenty of available buildings to be bought, fixed up and sold at a profit. Meanwhile, suffering evictees are nowhere to be seen, except for the rare occasions when they show up to protest or bid on the homes themselves.

Here’s a sobering dose of reality: Poverty in America has risen to the 27 percent mark in the last half-decade and, perhaps worse, the prospects for our nation’s poorest won’t necessarily get better as the economy picks up. It’s not news many want to hear, but we’re glad a group of researchers at Indiana University were gutsy enough to release it.

There are more than five times as many vacant homes in the U.S. as there are homeless people, according to Amnesty International USA. Since 2007, banks have shuttered about 8 million American houses, almost doubling the previous number, while 3.5 million homeless shiver in the cold.

The Occupy Our Homes campaign kicked off last Tuesday when hundreds of people, including activists, neighborhood residents and a couple of City Council members, marched through a neglected Brooklyn neighborhood to open a foreclosed house to a homeless family.

Those critics of Occupy Wall Street who claimed the movement lacked direction might look to foreclosed homes around the country, as well as housing auctions at select banks, where activists turned up Tuesday as part of the Occupy Our Homes initiative.

Father Eduardo Samaniego, the Jesuit pastor of Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church in San Jose, Calif., protested foreclosures by Bank of America against those in his flock and beyond by moving $3 million of his parish’s funds to a local credit union. (more)

Some 100 people—around 65 men and 35 women—taking part in an Occupy Boston protest were arrested in the wee hours of Tuesday morning after they refused to leave a newly groomed section of the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway near Dewey Square. (more)

In a startling move, the Obama administration is holding three major banks—Wells Fargo, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase—accountable for their bad lending habits on the mortgage market, cutting off funds from the Home Affordable Modification Program until they shape up.

Investigators at the United States Trustee Program, which oversees U.S. bankruptcy cases, are collecting mountains of evidence that show that banks industrywide are hurrying huge numbers of borrowers out of their homes prematurely, based on false loan repayment claims. (more)

Here’s one solution to the foreclosure crisis, albeit an ugly one. In what Gizmodo points out could very well be a publicity stunt, mobile ad company Adzookie says it will pay your mortgage if you let it turn your house into a giant billboard. Take it away, Chris Hedges.

With millions of homeowners still struggling to stay in their homes, the Obama administration’s $75 billion foreclosure prevention program has been weakened, perhaps fatally, by lax oversight and a posture of cooperation—rather than enforcement—with the nation’s biggest banks.

There are two potential ways to measure the economic performance of a political leader. One is by the profitability, stock prices and executive bonuses of a nation’s corporations. The other is by the financial condition of the majority of its population.

More than half of the state's homeowners with a mortgage—51.4 percent—spend more than 30 percent of their monthly income on housing costs, according to 2005-2009 estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey. ... (more)

At long last, a little good news from the real estate market: The National Association of Realtors reported a 10 percent rise in existing home sales in September, but buyers are still skittish about foreclosures and the country’s job problems figure into the long-term prognosis as well.

The crisis over faulty or fraudulent paperwork in mortgage foreclosures—which is either a big deal or a humongous deal, depending on which experts you believe—is the fault of arrogant, greedy lenders who played fast and loose with the basic property rights of homeowners.

The big banks that caused the collapse of the global finance market, and received tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded bailouts, have likely been engaging in wholesale fraud against homeowners and the courts.

Bank of America said Monday it will resume foreclosures in 23 states. The country’s largest bank stopped processing foreclosures nationwide while it investigated a mess of paperwork that cast doubt on the validity of home seizures. A self-imposed ban remains in 27 states.

In a welcome and much-needed turn of events for struggling American homeowners, all 50 state attorneys general are banding together to crack down on such sketchy foreclosure practices as “robo-signing,” as Forbes reported Wednesday.

How do you foreclose on a home when you can’t figure out who owns it because the original mortgage is part of a derivatives package that has been sliced and diced so many ways that its legal ownership is often unrecognizable?

The Obama administration isn’t ready to help homeowners stay in their homes by imposing a moratorium on repossessions, even though some banks are stopping foreclosures and resales of foreclosed homes and concerns about mortgage fraud are growing.

Truthdig’s own Robert Scheer schools listeners about the mortgage mess and the need for a moratorium on foreclosures in the opening minutes of this week’s “Left, Right & Center.” Tony Blankley joins him for a discussion of this and other topics.